The Sound of Ice Falling

It’s at the end of an evening, a small poetry reading. I tell him that I will share five minutes, but not give them.

He leads me out the front door of the house and around to the side car port where my bicycle sits waiting silently.

“Listen…”

Rain bounces off the roof, the trees speak as ice bursts off their weighed down branches. “This is Poetry,” he says. Would you like to go further? I nod. He takes my hand and leads me into the snow covered field.

I have barely spoken a word, trying to stand with the beauty of the moment, but also attempting to assess motives. Mist holds court as trees stand sentinel. The rain is catching in my hair, on my coat.

Still holding my hand, he narrates, “This is Poetry without Ego. This is nature present, and calm. Listen…All of this breaking and crashing, the land is experiencing so much pain right now, but it continues to speak…The trees, look at them, so firmly grounded yet they reach for the sky…And you, you shared your poetry and I can see you are so brilliant. Yet you have so much fear in you…” His voice sounds of the theater.

I think of how these ideas of nature are affirmations I immersed myself in years ago.

I think of how I almost cracked up earlier in the evening as a mutual aquaintance cued up Such Great Heights on the stereo while He and I stared into each other’s eyes talking. The line goes “I’m thinking it’s a sign, the freckles in our eyes are mirror images…” He said something along the lines of “You need to trust others while still knowing that they can not be trusted.”

And I’m still piecing together a jigsaw when he finds a knot the size of a tennis ball nestled in the blade of my shoulder simply by pulling me in for a hug. Mind you, I have a winter coat on. “I think my five minutes are up. Are you ready to go back?”

*

“You have so much fear in you.” is such a funny phrase to hear describe me. But mainly, what these human’s call fear, I call a skepticism of intent teamed with transient anxiety. How much naivety should one wrap themselves in while riding on a great big orb that constantly falls towards the sun?

Perhaps those trees aren’t reaching towards spirit & sky. Perhaps they are clinging onto the earth for dear life.

The joke of physics.

The joke of spirituality.

Perhaps it is time I finish reading a book my dear friend gave me. It’s name is The Gift of Fear.